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QuakeScribe — Notes

From raw seismic waveforms to structured event reports using DSP + CNN phase picking + constrained LLM generation.

Signal Processing CNN Phase Picking LLM Systems Numeric Validation
Repo

Problem

Noisy seismic waveforms often require manual interpretation to identify P/S arrivals and produce consistent event reports.

Approach

Combined DSP preprocessing, CNN-based phase picking, and constrained LLM report generation with numeric validation and QC-aware guardrails.

Pipeline

QuakeScribe pipeline diagram
Waveform → DSP → phase picking → feature vector → constrained LLM → numeric validation → report.
  • DSP preprocessing (band-pass + signal quality cues)
  • CNN phase picker produces P/S arrival candidates
  • Structured feature vector fed into the LLM via controlled prompts
  • Guardrails + numeric checks enforce faithfulness

Results

Spectrogram with phase picks
Spectrogram with P/S picks overlayed for interpretability.
Example QuakeScribe structured seismic report
Example output; confidence reflects phase-pick uncertainty and is used to trigger QC-aware fallbacks.

Engineering Notes

  • Constrained generation to keep outputs structured and predictable
  • Numeric consistency checks to prevent hallucinated values
  • QC-aware reporting (fallbacks when confidence is low)
  • Prompt templates designed for scientific reporting
  • Modular stages to support testing and substitution (phase picker / LLM)

Next Steps

  • Evaluate on more stations/events and quantify pick error distributions
  • Add calibration for confidence estimates and stronger QC thresholds
  • Improve report templates + add citations to computed features